As in every historical period, underlying musical aesthetics, informed
by the art of rhetoric, were as much influenced by the nature and limitations
of the instrumentarium as the other way round. For example, the considerably
shorter bows of the time demanded an approach to string playing that influenced,
among other things, rhythm, articulation and affective inflection. Indeed,
the doctrine of affect -- which can be loosely defined as expressive
articulation governed by stress and accentuation -- was the bread and butter
of baroque aesthetics. This is music, after all, that concerns itself with
the reproduction of speech rhythms and dialogue in sound. It also gives
way to a kind of contest, if you will, among the instruments, or more accurately,
among the musical lines carried by those instruments.

From this perspective affective intonation is central to baroque musical
grammar. Composers in those days organized rhythm cumulatively into a kind
of synthesis of the smallest motivic and metrical units, echoing the elaborate
designs in contemporary painting and architecture. Though the evocation
of nature was no less essential for conveying a musical mood, it was the
attention composers paid to detail and motivic characterization that fueled
it. The 'sweeping sostenutos', as Harnoncourt once described it, that gave
way to the modern legato (a different animal than its baroque incarnation),
were an invention the 19th century, not the 18th; Sostenuto, as it was later
understood in the full bloom of romanticism, was largely unknown. For the
baroque musician it was only a warning not to play the ensuing note too
early. Individual tones emerged quietly and weakly, only to be briefly inflated
before gradually dying away. Tones were conceived as syllables in the larger
sentence, and governed by these 'articulatory silences' which enveloped
them. Even a single tone assumed the characteristic of a spoken syllable,
or punctuation; it was something to be pronounced and inflected. Music back
then was understood, quite literally, as something three-dimensional, as
its transparent juxtaposition of tone and rhythm was the musical equivalent
of painting's chiaroscuro.

Thus, when Sarasa so knowingly launches into a new phrase period or idea,
it avails itself of these subtle dynamic shifts -- what some scholars have
dubbed 'micro-dynamics' -- that draw us into a pitch as if by stealth. But
Sarasa is hardly a poster boy for dreary academic theory. On the contrary,
it is an ensemble whose extraordinarily vigorous, gutsy and vivacious playing
is also informed at every moment by tradition as well as scholarship. Perhaps
it is no accident that virtually every one of the group's musicians
is a protégé of Harnoncourt, Leonhardt and other great leaders
of the early music movement.